Kaveh Akbar - Martyr! (Picador, 2024) ****½

Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet, novelist, and editor. Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1989. His family emigrated to the United States when he was two years old, and he grew up in several states, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Indiana.

Akbar received his bachelor's degree from Purdue, his MFA from Butler University, and his PhD in creative writing from Florida State University.

The name of the author and the book's title could be misleading: this is not a novel celebrating muslim martyrs on their jihad against the infidels, quite to the contrary: it's the story of a bisexual, non-religious, addicted poet who struggles with his life, his family, his origins, his place in society. Cyrus, the protagonist of the novel is collecting material to write a book about martyrdom, about people who value life so much that they were willing to die for it. 

Most chapters start by some excerpts from his Book of Martyrs that he is compiling. 

Apart from being very well written, the book is also beautifully composed, with different chapters offering the perspectives of different characters: Cyrus himself of coarse, Roya Shans - his mother who died in the Iranan plane that was shot by the US in 1988, - Orkideh - an Iranian artist organising her own death as an art exhibit at the Guggenheim museum, with some fictional characters interfering at moments, such as Lisa Simpson. 

He is constantly struggling with various addictions, which he also celebrates as much as hates.

"This was true. That little flicker of lucidity, light, like sun glint­ing off a snake in the grass. It happened a few months before Cyrus had gotten sober, and it wasn't until he was already good and drunk that he even remembered the existence of other people, and the fact that fire spreads, that if he lit himself on fire in a first-floor apart­ment bathtub, everyone else's apartments would likely catch fire too." (p. 14)

 He struggles with religion too, and he clearly is too well-educated and rational not to question some of the  Qran's commentaries: 

"Once, when I was a boy, our teacher told us the hadith of the starving man. The man was dying in the desert, got on his knees and begged to God, "Please help me, I'm starving, nearly dead, too tired to continue looking for water. I don't want to hurt anymore. Please, almighty Lord, take pity, end my suffering." God, in his infinite wis­dom, sent the man a baby. An infant to take care of. And so the man had purpose, a reason to stay alive.  

I remember thinking the story didn't make sense. Why not just send him food, water, a bed? God stories always seemed to work that way. Sideways, convoluted. Like one of those elaborate chain­reaction machines built in the most deliberately nonsensical way, using a track and a spring and a candle and a balloon to ring a bell." (p. 109)

He is a writer himself, a poet, struggling with language but also understanding the cultural roll of the dice about which language you speak. He does not claim any identity: 

"It was invented, of course, language. The first baby didn't come out speaking Farsi or Arabic or English or anything. We invented it, this language where one map is called Iraq and one man is called Iranian and so they kill each other. Where one man is called an offi­cer so he sends other men, with heads and hearts the size of his own, to split their stomachs open over barbed wire. Because of language, this sound stands for this thing, that sound stands for that thing, all these invented sounds strutting around, certain as roosters. It is no wonder we got it so wrong." (p. 125)

But language is also the only tool he has to come to grips with the world, to communicate, to express, with all its flaws and possibilities: 

 ""I guess, I write these sentences where I try to lineate grief or doubt or joy or sex or whatever till it sounds as urgent as it feels. But I know the words will never feel like the thing. The language will never be the thing. So it's damned, right? And I am too, for giv­ing my life to it. Because I know my writing can never make any of these deaths matter the way they're supposed to. It'll never arrest fascism in its tracks or save the planet. It'll never bring my mother back, you know?" (p. 185)

or also 

 "When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, "It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn't David." It's simple to cut things out of a life. You break up with a shitty partner, quit eating bread, delete the Twitter app. You cut it out, and the shape of what's actually killing you clarifies a little. The whole Abrahamic world invests itself in this promise: Don't lie, don't cheat, don't fuck or steal or kill, and you'll be a good person. Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That's the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands. A rich man goes a whole day without killing a single homeless person and so goes to sleep content in his goodness. In another world, he's buying crates of socks and Clif bars and tents, distributing them in city centers. But for him, abstinence reigns. 

I want to be the chisel, not the David. What can I make of being here? And what can I make of not?" (p. 270) 

And interspersed with great stories - invented or not - relevant and full of symbolism: 

""Some centuries ago all these Safavid explorers from Isfahan go to Europe-France, Italy, Belgium-and they see all these gargantuan mirrors all over. Ornate, massive mirrors everywhere in the palaces, in the great halls. Building-sized mirrors. They come back and they tell the shah about them and of course he wants a bunch for himself. So he tells his explorers, his diplomats, to go back to Europe and bring him mirrors, giant mirrors, buy them for any price. And so they do, but of course as they bring these massive mirrors back across the world, they shatter, they fracture into a billion little mirror pieces. Instead of great panes of mirror, the shah's architects in Isfahan had all this massively expensive broken mirror glass to work with. And so they begin making these incredible mosaics, shrines, prayer niches." 

"Whoa." 

"I think about this a lot, Cyrus. These cenruries of Persians try­ing to copy the European vanity, really their self-reflection. How it arrived to us in shards. How we had to look at ourselves in these broken fragments, and how those mirror tiles found themselves in all these mosques, the tilework, these ornate mosaics. How those spaces made the fractured glimpses of ourselves near sacred". (p. 157)

These multiple shards also represents his own life: what is he in the end? 

"It felt like the only time Cyrus ever really felt now-ness was when he was using. When now was physiologically, chemically discern­ible from before. Otherwise he felt completely awash in time: stuck between birth and death - an interval where he'd never quite gotten his footing. But he was also awash in the world and its checkboxes­, neither Iranian nor American, neither Muslim nor not-Muslim, nei­ther drunk or in meaningful recovery, neither gay nor straight. Each camp thought he was too much the other thing. That there were camps at all made his head swim." (p. 246) 

It is a very strong novel about existence, about why I'm here, about what I am, and how to get any meaning from this? 

"If the mortal sin of the suicide is greed, to hoard stillhess and calm for yourself while dispersing your riotous internal pain among all those who survive you, then the mortal sin of the martyr must be pride, the vanity; the hubris to believe not only that your death could mean more than your living, but that your death could mean more than death itself - which, because it is inevitable, means nothing. 

-from BOOKOFMARTYRS.docx by Cyrus Shams" (p. 250)

It's absolutely excellent: deep, smart, intelligent, moving, relevant, tightly composed with a wisdom to ask the right questions, with the wisdom to value personal relationships, with the wisdom to question all this at the same time. 

Don't miss it!